DONG! DONG! HER FOOTSTEPS RANG TOO LOUDLY. So much for stealth. The narrow stair smelled musty, of dust and hot wire. She ducked torn cobwebs to reach the bottom.
Ahead, bluish lights glimmered, luring her like fairy flames into the mire. A brass anteater scuttled across her path, concertina nose snuffling after a startled metal centipede, click-clack-click-clack!
She hefted her pistol at eye level. “Who’s there?”
Just screeching metal, clanging glass. The glow grew brighter as she walked, and finally she emerged into the light.
A vast basement, rows of arc-lights hovering into the distance. Benches were loaded with voltmeters, ampmeters, magnetometers, instruments to measure calorific and de-phlogistication and aetheric disturbance. On a shelf lay an optical, similar to her own, multiple lenses on gleaming brass stalks. Crane had known Henry Jekyll, after all, walking the same shadowy, unorthodox corridors. Perhaps he’d shown her an early design.
In the center, beneath a shining arc-lamp, sat the machine.
Larger than Henry’s, a set of crystal-studded brass rings twelve feet in diameter orbiting the aetheric generator, where a knot of blue filaments crackled and hissed. Tangled wires hung, clipped to the testing equipment. Heat sinks, lightning rods, power drains, and other unrecognizable parts protruded like bristling spines.
On the floor, tied to a heavy table with stout rope, slouched Seymour Locke.
She stared, her confidence crumbling to dust. Surely Locke was responsible. This had to be a ruse.
“Dr. Jekyll.” Locke coughed hoarsely. Hair lank, skin sallow, eyes over-bright with fever. As if he’d been trapped here a while. “You found us.”
Cautiously, she edged closer, pistol ready. “Us? I left Starling outside.”
A caustic smile. “Thought I heard him howling. Get the acid, did he? Always was over-confident. Nice plan of yours, to get him to go first. I should’ve thought of that.”
“Why are you tied up?”
“I truly thought you’d arrive before me. Funny, how things work out. Tell me you didn’t do as I asked, Doctor. Tell me you didn’t bring your father’s cursed book.”
The package smarted under her arm. “But . . .”
Locke swore. “Of course you did. That’s how it happens. Knew I could rely on you.” Bitterly he jerked his chin towards the machine. “He’s over there. I only wish I’d warned you. All I can say in my defense is that I didn’t know.”
Inside the machine, bolted on with sturdy steel bands, was a metal stool. And on it, fiddling ferociously with a row of buttons and levers, sat Seymour Locke.
He wore a dark coat and fawn trousers, his long blond hair tossed over one shoulder in an untidy knot. Unshaven, scarred and bruised, dark crescents beneath glittering eyes. The Locke she knew was twenty-five at most. This fellow looked forty.
Eliza’s eyes boggled. Switched from one Locke to the other, her brain refusing to surrender to the truth.
Time shift. Locke had traveled into his own past—and met himself.
Locke the elder grinned. The same cold, insolent smile, sharpened by a broken front tooth. “Dr. Jekyll. So glad you could join us.”
Tossed about his neck, beneath his ragged hair, was the bloodstained blue scarf.
Some long-haired reprobate in a top hat. The mysterious visitor had been Locke all along.
Just not the same one.
“Don’t look so shocked.” He jumped from his stool and limped closer, gait hitching. “Is that my book? Not before time.” A husky chuckle, his voice ruined by drink or abuse or some other frightful circumstance. “Before time. Ha! Honestly, these jokes never get old.” His right sleeve was pinned roughly over a truncated forearm. Somewhere—somewhen—he’d lost a hand. “Now give over, there’s a good stooge.”
Clutching the book, she backed away, pistol steady. “Not a chance. Untie him. We’re leaving—”
“Leaving!” Hippocrates barreled belatedly down the stairs, splashed with noisome filth. “Escape imperative! Make greater speed!” He hurtled into her skirts, knocking her off balance, and the book slipped from her grip and fell to the floor.
In a flash, Locke the elder dived in and wrenched her pistol away.
But he didn’t point it at her.
Crrack! Blue current forked, stabbing the floor beside the book. Locke cursed his aim—left-handed, of course, and to think she’d imagined he’d missed his shot at the demonstration through lack of practice—and fired again, point blank. A much weaker blast, but it was enough. The dry paper burst into flames, and swiftly reduced to ash.
Hipp cowered behind her skirts. “Error,” he muttered. “Idiot. Sorry.”
Eliza stared, aghast. The air shimmered with excess potential, making her woozy. “What have you done? That’s Mr. Faraday’s book. Now you’ll never fix your machine.”
The younger Locke, who was wriggling in his ropes, just looked at her and laughed.
Locke the elder laughed, too, the same yet strangely different. Bitter, painful to hear. “Oh, the machine works. That’s the thing. It works too well. I’ve spent the last eight years trying to stop the god-awful thing from working.”
“But Interlunium . . . you needed Mr. Faraday’s book. Starling said so.”
Locke the elder snorted. “Starling’s an idiot. That iteration of this fiasco has long been done with. I barely recall it.” He kicked viciously, scattering the ashes of Faraday’s masterpiece. “In any case, who needed Faraday? He couldn’t even solve the field equations without Ada Byron, and look where that got him. Think she betrayed him to the Royal for lines of force? No, it was this that terrified her. Pity for him she didn’t realize the entire project was my idea all along.”
“So,” she murmured, “it was you Ephronia was afraid of. A lowly assistant, you said. But Wyverne knew better, didn’t he? Only no one believed him.”
“Afraid so. You could ask Henry,” he added with a cruel smile, “if he wasn’t dead.”
Clunk! More puzzle pieces slotted into place. “Henry’s student. Seymour Q. Locke. You’re Quentin!”
“Very good,” he declared with a flick of long hair. “I was the real brains. Henry and Finch and their cronies were just passengers. Too scared even to test it. Not a pair of balls between them. So they sent me here, to the future. But the machine got damaged and I got stuck here. Or rather, he did.” He waved a disgusted arm at younger Locke. “And now the thick-headed twist is rebuilding it, isn’t he, with Ephronia and Antoinette and the rest. Of course they had to die.”
The younger Locke gave the same arrogant head-toss, angry curls flying. “So you killed them, just to prevent the machine from ever existing? Congratulations, idiot. Great job. It’s gone swimmingly.”
Eliza blinked. “But you—he—must have succeeded in rebuilding it! Or he will. For you to come here from his future.”
“Give the lady a prize,” sneered Locke the elder. “Hark at the poor lamb. He still thinks he can return to his own time and live out his life. Ha! Seymour old thing, you’ve no idea what’s about to happen.” He shrugged. “Or, in this case, what isn’t about to happen.”
Alarms clanged in her head. Mr. Paxton’s insistence that the engine was dangerous, that it ate up precious aether and destabilized the fabric of the world. “What do you mean? Does it cause some catastrophe?”
“Aether disturbance,” said Hipp helpfully, poking his head from under a table. “Cataclysmic. Probability high.”
“Oh, it’s worse than that.” A nasty broken-toothed grin. “Luckily, you’ll never know. Because I’m about to destroy this machine, along with all evidence it ever existed. I was on track, you know. Everything was at last going to plan. And then you came along, and started enabling the cursed thing.”
Her blood chilled. Blithely, she’d collected the evidence. Ephronia’s notes. Henry’s prototype. Mr. Faraday’s book.
“Clever, aren’t you?” Locke the elder wiped his damp face with his forearm, and recharged the pistol to point it at her. “A shame, really. Because now the only evidence left is this machine, him”—he gestured rudely to the younger Locke, who scowled—“and you.”